The Explore RSU Libraries search box on the library website is a great place to start your research. It searches all the library's resources in one place including books/ebooks, journal and news articles and government information. Enter your key words and start searching below!
Academic Search Complete offers an enormous collection of full-text journals, providing users access to critical information from many sources unique to this database. In addition, it includes peer-reviewed full text for STEM research, as well as for the social sciences and humanities. Scholarly content covers a broad range of important areas of academic study, including anthropology, engineering, law, sciences and more. This is an excellent database to start your research.
Premier online database containing more than 186 million pages and 287,000 titles of historical and government documents in a fully searchable, image-based format. HeinOnline provides comprehensive coverage from inception of more than 2,800 law-related periodicals.
This database provides full-text journals, books and other published humanities sources from around the world. It includes all data from Humanities International Index plus unique full-text content, much of which is not available in other databases.
Provides high-quality, full-text journal articles relating to nearly every field of scholarly study. This database specializes in historical content, with some articles dating back to the late 1800s. In most cases, the most recent one to five years are not available in full-text. JSTOR also has more than 11,000 open access, freely available ebooks from 130+ publishers, including Cornell University Press, University College of London, and University of California Press.
Use Project MUSE Standard Journals Collection to find scholarly journals in the humanities and social sciences. Journals are from over 200 university presses and scholarly societies.
Did you know that when you enter an entire sentence into Google it searches each.. word.. individually? That's why you get millions of results back! Luckily Google does a decent job of returning relevant results from a sentence. Unlike Google, databases can't understand an entire sentence. You will need to break your topic down into the most important ideas, or keywords. Even Google will give you better results if you use relevant keywords!
Exclude irrelevant words
When using the databases, you should exclude all extraneous words from your searches. First, leave out all articles (a, and, the) in your search. Next, narrow your search terms down to two or three words that describe exactly what you hope to find For example, if you are writing a paper about the theme of discrimination in Frankenstein, narrowing your search terms down to discrimination and Frankenstein will likely retrieve a manageable list of more precise results.
After you have selected your initial search terms, list any synonyms or related terms that might be relevant to your topic. For example, if your search terms are Frankenstein and discrimination, you might want to try synonyms such as "prejudice" or "intolerance" in place of discrimination. You may even replace discrimination with a related term, such as "inhumanity." Successful searches are often the result of trying out a variety of terms. Most databases will provide you with suggestions of additional or alternate search terms to use, which can lead you to better results in a shorter amount of time.
Once you've broken down your research topic into keywords you can start searching more in-depth using filters and other search tools. The boolean operators and, or, & not can help you combine keywords to retrieve results directly related to your topic. Boolean operators are like a type of filter and can be used in just about any search bar, including databases and Google!
Most library databases have built in search tools such as filters.
Here are some useful filters:
You can also view the Advanced Search for more filters and tools!